Monday, December 31, 2007

AT SOME point in the decade after he moved from the farm in Nebraska where he grew up to the innovation hub that is the San Francisco Bay Area, Evan Williams accidentally stumbled upon three insights. First, that genuinely new ideas are, well, accidentally stumbled upon rather than sought out; second, that new ideas are by definition hard to explain to others, because words can express only what is already known; and third, that good ideas seem obvious in retrospect. So, having already had two accidental successes—one called Blogger, the other Twitter—Mr Williams is now trying to make accidents a regular occurrence for his company, called Obvious.

Second Life and other virtual worlds for grown-ups have enjoyed intense media attention in the last year but fallen far short of breathless expectations. The children’s versions are proving much more popular, to the dismay of some parents and child advocacy groups. Now the likes of the Walt Disney Company, which owns Club Penguin, are working at warp speed to pump out sister sites.

Sunday, December 30, 2007

In his day, the Ford Motor Company maintained a “Sociological Department” staffed with investigators who visited the homes of all but the highest-level managers. Their job was to dig for information about the employee’s religion, spending and savings patterns, drinking habits and how the worker “amused himself.”

Home inspections are no longer needed; many companies are using the Internet to snoop on their employees. If you fail to maintain amorphous “professional” standards of conduct in your free time, you could lose your job.

Saturday, December 29, 2007

AOL LLC today pulled the plug on Netscape Navigator, the Web browser that once owned the lion's share of the market and that was the focus of a landmark federal antitrust case against Microsoft Corp.

In an announcement posted to AOL's blog for the browser, Tom Drapeau, the director of the company's Netscape brand, said the team is ending development and would cease issuing security updates as of Feb. 1, 2008.

"Given AOL's current business focus and the success the Mozilla Foundation has had in developing critically-acclaimed products, we feel it's the right time to end development of Netscape-branded browsers, hand the reigns [sic] fully to Mozilla and encourage Netscape users to adopt Firefox," Drapeau said.

Friday, December 28, 2007

A Christmas rally in Apple's share price made it the world's third most valuable new technology company, behind Microsoft and Google, sealing one of the most dramatic corporate turnrounds ever achieved.

The stock price surge has taken the maker of iPods and Macs past industry stalwarts such as IBM and Intel and was capped this week as Apple topped even Cisco, the networking equipment maker. With a market capitalisation of $174bn, up more than $100bn from a year ago, Apple is one of Wall Street's stand-out successes.

Yet while Apple's core business of digital music players and desktop computers remains robust, analysts warned that it faces a significant product transition to mobile handsets and a new generation of home digital media devices.

Many of the CHM's videos already were on its own site, but they partnered with YouTube because of bandwidth issues. An important side effect is that YouTube can bring scores of new viewers who otherwise wouldn't seek out the CHM resources.

This is probably the most positive Walt Mossberg review I've seen for a Windows machine. See the full article for more details (and, of course, even stronger praise for Apple).

Something interesting is going on at Dell. The Texas personal-computer behemoth, long associated with boxy, boring machines, has started emphasizing industrial design. And the company, which in recent years seemed to care only about corporate customers, techies and hard-core gamers, appears once again interested in average, mainstream consumers who value simplicity.

The most tangible example of this new approach is Dell’s XPS One desktop — an elegant, handsome, cleverly designed one-piece computer. If it didn’t have the Dell logo on it, the XPS One might be mistaken for a product of the PC industry’s design leaders, Apple or Sony.

Monday, December 24, 2007

The 3G iPhone will make this an even rosier picture for service providers

Buyers of Apple’s iPhone have turned out to be voracious users of electronic mail and other data services, giving network operators hope that the much-hyped device will finally unlock billions of dollars in mobile advertising revenue.

After years of false dawns for operators, the use of mobile phones for web surfing is on the verge of becoming widespread in Europe and the US, and iPhone research by O2 shows the device is acting as an important catalyst for such activity.

Buckingham Palace on Sunday said the 81-year-old monarch will post her traditional Christmas Day message--normally broadcast on television--on the video-sharing Web site as well this year.

At the same time, a new Royal Channel has been unveiled on YouTube, allowing Web surfers to view the queen's first Christmas broadcast in 1957, as well as other archive footage of the royal family and its events.

Google News, an increasingly popular way to get news online, may tip that balance, however, with a feature it calls “Comments From People in the News.” The idea is simple: if you have been quoted in an article that appears on Google News, which presents links and summaries from 4,500 news sources, including the familiar big players, you can post a comment that will be paired with that article. (Journalists can comment, as well, Google says, though none have done so thus far.)

Sunday, December 23, 2007

Stonebraker is the tech world's equivalent of Tom Brady: an idea guy it seems silly to bet against. His first three companies, all started in the 1980s and 1990s while he was teaching computer science at Berkeley, were acquired by high-tech biggies Computer Associates, Informix, and PeopleSoft for as much as $400 million.

But lately, Stonebraker has been a bit of a bumblebee, flitting from one company to another. In 2003, he started a company called StreamBase Systems Inc., now based in Lexington. Two years later, while still serving as StreamBase's chief technologist, he cofounded Vertica. Both database companies attracted funding from the same two local venture capital firms, Bessemer Venture Partners and Highland Capital Partners. With 2007 almost done, the timing could be right for another start-up.

Saturday, December 22, 2007

So it's a complicated situation but I want to keep everyone in the loop. Bottom line is I've received an overture from the Mothership with a mention of a Think Secret type settlement if I'll stop impersonating Dear Leader on the Web. Nothing nailed down at this point but frankly, honestly, I'm tempted to just take it.

That strongly suggests that IBM is buying Solid mainly to compete with Oracle TimesTen. As of last June, solidDB was already IBM’s TimesTen answer via a partnership; this deal just solidifies that arrangement.

This probably isn’t good news for Solid’s MySQL engine. That’s a pity, since solidDB technically has the potential to be the best MySQL engine around.

More on IBM/Solid. This is a subtly significant deal, in part because Solid's solidDB for MySQL product helped to fill a MySQL gap (the lack of a high-performance, row-level-locking, transaction-based MySQL storage subsystem) after Oracle acquired Innobase in October, 2005. I'm surprised MySQL AB didn't acquire Solid; apparently many MySQL enterprise customers will now be dependent on IBM and/or Oracle.

International Business Machines (IBM.N) Corp said on Friday it has agreed to buy in-memory database software provider Solid Information Technology from private owners for an undisclosed sum.

"We are pleased that the Protocol Freedom Information Foundation has chosen to take a (license) ... which will provide Samba with access to our specifications for the Windows protocols...," Microsoft said in a statement.

The foundation paid Microsoft 10,000 euros and will get the documentation it needs for all workgroup server protocols. Samba must keep the information secret, but it can and will reveal source codes to carry out the protocols.

Although Google, the leading Internet search portal, and DoubleClick, which connects advertisers to advertising opportunities on the Web, have been waiting for the better part of the year for an antitrust decision from the F.T.C., their uncertainty is not over yet. The merger could still be held up in Europe, where personal privacy has more legal protections than in the United States and where regulators do not always follow the F.T.C.’s lead on antitrust cases.

The European Commission said it would decide by April 2 whether the Google-DoubleClick deal should go through. Last month, the commission extended its scrutiny after an initial review raised competition concerns.

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd., showing its popular device is moving beyond purely business customers, reported strong third-quarter earnings fueled by rapid consumer growth during the lead-up to the holiday season.

The Waterloo, Ontario, equipment maker and wireless email provider said net income surged to $370.5 million, or 65 cents a share, from $175.2 million, or 31 cents a share, in the year-earlier quarter. Revenue doubled to $1.67 billion.

Solid Information Technology is the leading provider of fast, always-on and affordable database solutions. Solid serves both Embedded customers and Enterprise end-users with a combination of open source and proprietary database products.

There are more than 3,000,000 deployments of Solid's database technology worldwide in telecommunications networks, enterprise applications, and embedded software and systems. Market leaders such as Alcatel, Cisco, EMC2, HP, Nokia and Siemens rely on Solid for their mission-critical applications.

Yeah, that was probably a pretty stressful morning... It'll be fascinating to see how N closes today.

When trading began yesterday, it looked as if the IPO investors had buyer's remorse. The stock fell as low as $23.86 before rebounding strongly to finish at $35.50, up $9.50, or 36.5 percent.

That left NetSuite with a market value of $2.1 billion.

"This has been a surreal experience," Zachary Nelson, NetSuite's chief executive, said shortly after ringing the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange. Nelson's 3.4 percent stake in NetSuite is now worth $73 million.

Thursday, December 20, 2007

Apparently the irrationally exuberant investment community works mostly in the afternoon...

NetSuite (N 35.50, +9.50, +36.5%) shares dipped into negative territory as trading began, then gained more than 3% after a few minutes before staggering back into the red. But the stock bounced back early afternoon, rising more than 36% to more than $35.50 a share.

This came after the company got a substantial bump in the price of its initial public offering. The deal was priced late Wednesday at $26 per share following a Dutch auction that originally was pushing the deal at a price range of $13 to $16 before NetSuite twice raised the price range in the days before the offering.

Larry Ellison is having a pretty good week (the Boston Globe article referenced in the next post also notes, for example, that "Having bankrolled NetSuite in its early days, Ellison owns a 54.5 percent stake, worth $844 million").

Oracle recorded $5.3 billion in revenue in the second quarter of its fiscal 2008, up 28% from the $4.2 billion it made in the same quarter last year. Net income rose 35% to $1.3 billion from $967 million the year-ago quarter. There don’t seem to be any obvious signs of weakness: New software licenses, a key metric for the company, grew 38% to $1.67 billion, and U.S. sales were strong despite gloom and doom tech-spending forecasts – although those forecasts may be more of a warning sign for future quarters. Oracle’s stock was up almost 5% in after-hours trading.

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Microsoft Corp.'s Office Live Workspace, just released into beta, makes it easy for small businesses, workgroups and organizations to collaborate online and share documents. Even individuals who want to track projects and access documents from more than one PC will find it useful. It's a surprisingly sophisticated service, and although there remain rough edges and puzzling oversights (which may or may not be addressed in the commercial release), it's a very impressive piece of work, especially considering its price tag -- free for the moment.

Bruce Chizen, Adobe's CEO who abruptly resigned in 2007, has been mum on his future plans. But sources say Chizen is going to join Microsoft to run the Expression team in the new year. As Microsoft watchers know, Adobe and Microsoft are competing head-to-head in the design-tool space. If the sources are right (and there are no non-competes in the way), Chizen may have a new roost to rule soon.

So the bad news is that despite two decades of lectures from Dr. Norman on the virtue of “user-centered” design and the danger of a disease called “featuritis,” people will still be cursing at their gifts this Christmas.

And the worse news is that the gadgets of Christmas future will be even harder to command, because we and our machines are about to go through a rocky transition as the machines get smarter and take over more tasks. As Dr. Norman says in his new book, “The Design of Future Things,” what we’ll have here is a failure to communicate.

"Functionality is not there, is poorly documented or just doesn't work. It's clearly not ready for prime time," said Mr. MacBeth, who earlier this year helped found mobile software start-up MergeLab.

Complaints about new software aren't unusual, but a sizable number of developers -- the very people Google hopes will add the bells and whistles to its mobile-phone software -- are complaining that the tool kit is plagued by coding errors. Google, they said, has been largely unresponsive.

Walter H. G. Lewin, 71, a physics professor, has long had a cult following at M.I.T. And he has now emerged as an international Internet guru, thanks to the global classroom the institute created to spread knowledge through cyberspace.

Professor Lewin’s videotaped physics lectures, free online on the OpenCourseWare of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have won him devotees across the country and beyond who stuff his e-mail in-box with praise.

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Missed this one last week -- Charles Fitzgerald's anticipatory obituary for OpenSocial; see the full post for details

A little over a month ago OpenSocial was hailed as "checkmate" and mesmerized the blogosphere. Now, the chorus of Kumbaya has been replaced by the cacophony of competition. As I argued earlier, OpenSocial was a game plan we've seen before, just not a particularly successful one.

I wrote a post Friday with the thought that Amazon should buy eBay, and readers nearly revolted at the idea. The outpouring of rage at eBay was of the sort we don’t see here for anything other than cellphone companies. The company is clearly getting hit by both buyers and sellers. I’ll write a post shortly on the frustrations of merchants on eBay.(UPDATE: That post is here.) Below is a sampling of the complaints from Bits readers.

As the anti-OOXML mob’s technical and editorial objections evaporate, and consequently as the reasonable people increasingly see that ISO is delivering a good result for them and jump ship, the rabid anti-OOXML misinformation campaign is ramping up. The basic strategy is to say that things are so bad that no improvement is possible, and indeed that any improvement is complicity.

But it is quite possible for the different sides to engage civilly and constructively.

[Dave Girouard: Vice President and General Manager of Google's Enterprise business:] We're getting amazingly fast traction with small businesses, and now we're starting to see bigger businesses more. We definitely have some large businesses that are evaluating or piloting Google Apps. They like the vision that you ought to have some different types of solutions out there like Google as alternatives to IBM or Microsoft.

Any of the big guys, like Accenture or IBM Global Services, they all look at SAAS and it doesn't quite fit their model. They're used to saying, 'SAP installation, send in the school buses and we'll put people on site for a year.' SAAS is different, it's easier. What I would hope and expect in the coming months is that you're going to see big companies coming out and saying 'we're using Apps and we're using them to scale.

Talk about a fall from grace: this is the company that virtually invented the smart wireless device, and today, courtesy of siliconalleyinsider,a shocking realization that the company's stock is worth less than its balance sheet.

The blog says that Palm's current market cap of $573 million is woefully short of its $369 million in cash and $259 million in short-term investments.

The maker of popular consumer and corporate software such as Photoshop and Acrobat reported Monday that its fourth-quarter profit climbed 21 percent, beating Wall Street expectations.

Executives credited record revenue, from Adobe's biggest-ever software launch. Net income for the three months that ended Nov. 30 was $222.2 million, or 38 cents a share, compared with $183.2 million, or 30 cents a share, in the same period a year ago. Sales were a record $911.2 million, up 34 percent and easily exceeding the company's own estimates of $860 million to $890 million.

If the initial public offering for NetSuite shares goes as planned later this week, Evan Goldberg will have come a long way from the overcrowded Silicon Valley apartment that served as the company’s first office nearly 10 years ago.

Monday, December 17, 2007

Some insights from my Burton Group colleague Guy Creese (see his post for details)

The New York Times just published an article by Steve Lohr and Miguel Helft on Google vs. Microsoft entitled, "Google Gets Ready to Rumble with Microsoft." While I was quoted in it--"A recent report by the Burton Group, a technology research firm, concluded that it was 'unclear at this point whether Google will be able to capitalize on the trends that it’s accelerating.'”--there were a number of my quotes left on the cutting room floor. So I thought I'd add them back in via my blog.

Don't worry; it's only people who are trying to determine which (explicit or implicit) ads to put in front of you, in order to sell you stuff...

You may never hear a word from a conversation analyst, but there's a very good chance one is paying close attention to what you're saying on blogs, in Web forums or in product reviews on sites that sell books or blenders.

Small comfort to kids looking for an Xmas Wii. I wonder what the average price of a Wii rain check will be, on eBay...

''We expect this to be a great way for consumers who desperately want a Wii to have something to put under the tree,'' Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime said Friday.

The rain checks will be available at the regular Wii system price, $249.99, on Dec. 20 and 21, and will entitle buyers to get the Nintendo console before Jan. 29. Fils-Aime said ''many tens of thousands of rain checks'' would be available.

More Americans are Googling themselves - and many are checking out their friends, co-workers, and romantic interests, too.

In a report yesterday, the Pew Internet and American Life Project said 47 percent of US adult Internet users have looked for information about themselves through Google or another search engine. That is more than twice the 22 percent of users who did in 2002, but Pew senior research specialist Mary Madden was surprised the growth wasn't higher.

Although the Microsoft effort was started about five years ago by Craig Mundie, one of the company’s three chief technical officers, it picked up speed recently with the hiring of a number of experts from the supercomputing industry and academia.

Mr. Mundie himself is a veteran of previous efforts in the supercomputer industry during the 1980s and 1990s to make breakthroughs in parallel computing. “I’m happy that by hiring a bunch of old hands, who have been through these wars for 10 or 20 years, we at least have a nucleus of people who kind of know what’s possible and what isn’t,” he said.

I'm not a financial analyst, but I think one feasible permutation in this context is an IPO and then, ~shortly thereafter (e.g., 6 months later), an Oracle acquisition

Not everyone is enthralled with NetSuite. The company is launching its IPO through a modified auction format; the company warns that investors shouldn't bid if they are hoping to make a short-term profit soon after the stock begins trading, because market demand may not match the price set by the auction.

The auction format, along with the fact that the company has never been profitable, doesn't sit well with Francis Gaskins, president of research site IPODesktop.com. The closest the company has come to eking out a profit recently was in the third quarter, when it lost $1.8 million.

Sunday, December 16, 2007

Knol's model of having a writer submit content in exchange for a split of ad revenue is identical to About's model with its guides, and no one views About as anything but a Web publisher. Of course, Google gave up its content "purity" a long time ago by buying the largest video site on the Web and a photo-sharing service, but at least now everyone will see Google for the content-publishing deathstar that it is.

The growing confrontation between Google and Microsoft promises to be an epic business battle. It is likely to shape the prosperity and progress of both companies, and also inform how consumers and corporations work, shop, communicate and go about their digital lives. Google sees all of this happening on remote servers in faraway data centers, accessible over the Web by an array of wired and wireless devices — a setup known as cloud computing. Microsoft sees a Web future as well, but one whose center of gravity remains firmly tethered to its desktop PC software. Therein lies the conflict.

Later in the NYT article:

FOR its part, Google faces its own set of challenges: competition from Microsoft and from Web-based productivity software being offered by start-ups like Zoho and Transmedia as well as more established players like Yahoo. A recent report by the Burton Group, a technology research firm, concluded that it was “unclear at this point whether Google will be able to capitalize on the trends that it’s accelerating.”

"The biggest enemy of everyone in this room is Google," suggested Koos Bekker, managing director of Naspers Ltd., a multimedia conglomerate in South Africa. No one disagreed.

Google's galaxy has expanded since Eisenmann wrote his case study. The study, which foreshadowed Google's push into fields like business software and e- commerce, lists the Mountain View, Calif., company as having $2 billion in operating income on $6.1 billion in revenue in 2005. It's now on track to post 2007 operating income of nearly $5 billion on revenue of nearly $16 billion. It has more than 6,000 employees, from the Googleplex in Silicon Valley to Kendall Square in Cambridge to high-tech outposts around the planet.

And it's continuing to grow, determined to dominate the Internet-hosting screens of the future, especially cellphones and televisions, as well as desktop and notebook computers.

The race is on -- to an extremely obscure wing of the ivory tower. Who will own the study of the social networking sites? Is it computer science or behavioral science? Is it neuropsychology or artificial intelligence? PhDs around the country are trying to figure out, in their esoteric and socially awkward way, how to get in while the getting's good.

Raduchel was in a top strategy role at Sun Microsystems back in the late 1990s, when that company filed its antitrust suit against Microsoft. And he had some choice things to say about Microsoft at the time, according to quotes rediscovered by Todd Bishop over at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

In an announcement on Google's corporate blog, Udi Manber, a vice president of engineering, said a knol on a particular subject "is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read." Wikipedia currently fills that role for many people searching for information on the Internet.

[...]

Mr. Manber, who had been chief executive of Amazon.com Inc.'s A9 subsidiary before joining Google last year, stressed that Google would not serve as editor in any manner and would exercise no control over the content.

1. The correlation between quality/useful "knols" and direct financial compensation

2. The extent to which Wikipedia, which already has many "natural monopoly" attributes, can get creative and provide competitive compensation to the most productive/useful authors, if the correlation turns out to be pivotal

First, despite all the criticism of its privacy policies, Facebook is fundamentally based on the notion of privacy. You cannot find out much about someone unless they have willingly elected to be your "friend," or if they are in a partially-open network you also belong to - for your town or workplace or school. The other reason is that Facebook is intended to be a communications medium. Think of it as, in part, a way to broadcast information about yourself.

Linkedin, by contrast, is a sort of high-end consensual database of colleagues. In some ways it aims to turn the entire planet's workforce into one big set of colleagues, who only come to know one another when one can solve a problem for the other. You can look for that job or find that consultant or employee, because Linkedin's member data is essentially open for all to see, and because the site offers search tools to help you slice and dice it. (They are much more sophisticated and useful if you're a paying member.)

A couple data points doesn't constitute a trend, but it is an interesting pattern...

The New Microsoft: Ahead of ScheduleRemember the "old" Microsoft, you know, the one that would promise products at a certain time and then deliver them months or even years later? The Microsoft of Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, and WinFS? You know those guys. Well, that Microsoft may be coming to an end, if I'm reading the tea leaves correctly. In the last week alone, everyone's favorite recalcitrant monopolist actually delivered two major product milestones well ahead of schedule, and I'm surprised this hasn't gotten more press.

Knol and Wikipedia would be different in other ways. While Wikipedia is a not-for-profit and ad-free endeavor, Knol has a more commercial bent: Authors could choose to have Google place ads on their pages and would get part of the revenue.

“At some point, Google crosses the line, where they are not only a search engine, but also a content provider,” Mr. Sullivan said. Technically speaking, he said, authors, not Google, would create Knol pages. “But it matters how it appears,” he said. “I do a search on Google, I go to some place that Google hosts and I also find Google ads.”

I think this will come down, in part, to:

1. Information value and information value-add: if Knol has more useful and accurate entries than Wikipedia, people should go with the better source

2. Google's search heuristics: if there's any data suggesting Google is biasing search results to favor resources it controls, it should prove devastating to Google's "don't be evil" etc. good will, and people should search elsewhere

Friday, December 14, 2007

Expectations 2.0: you haven't changed the world within ~6 weeks of announcement?...

When Google unveiled its OpenSocial developer initiative at the end of October, observers hailed it as the future of the social Web.

But is the search king already too late to the party?

It's been over six weeks, and OpenSocial--which uses open-source code to allow any participating social media site to implement a common set of application program interfaces (APIs) and create "universal" applications--isn't finished, though developers believe it will be ready early in 2008. In the meantime, a number of partners have launched independent developer platform strategies, and Facebook has announced that other social networks will be able to use its own applications, rivaling what Google can offer.

The antimerger groups, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Center for Digital Democracy, cited our article and the subsequent deletion in a letter to the FTC on Thursday saying the commission's representatives "who addressed yesterday the representation of Doubleclick by Jones Day before the Commission were either misinformed or willfully misled the public." They're filing a Freedom of Information Act request for any relevant documents.

The subtext here is that EPIC and CDD are trying to embarrass Majoras into recusing herself, which would remove a Republican vote likely to be more sympathetic to free market arguments. That would leave two Republicans and two Democrats left with a vote. (On the other hand, for all we know, all five commissioners could be enthusiastic about supporting the deal.)

Less than three months after Microsoft lost a landmark antitrust case in Europe, a Norwegian software company filed a new complaint Thursday, challenging the software giant’s bundling of its Web browser with its Windows operating system.

[...]

The company’s chief technology officer, Hakon Lie, said that the bundling of Internet Explorer into Windows, which has more than 80 percent of the market share in Europe, violated European antitrust law.

Global Equities Research analyst, Trip Chowdhry, said the release of the trial versions of the Microsoft virtualization programs, which come on the heels of Oracle Corp.'s unexpected entry last month into the market for virtualization software, is bad news for VMware.

Chowdhry said engineers at Microsoft have told him Microsoft's virtualization programs are three times as efficient as those from VMware, which is based in Palo Alto, Calif.

Thursday, December 13, 2007

Cisco Systems Inc. made its biggest foray yet into the entertainment and social networking world by announcing plans late Tuesday for the Cisco Entertainment Operating System.

EOS will be a hosted software-as-a-service platform that Cisco will deliver sometime in 2008 to various media companies, said Dan Scheinman, general manager of the Cisco media solutions group. He spoke about the project in a keynote address late Tuesday at Cisco's annual analyst conference, C-Scape 2007, in San Jose.

Rep. Joe Barton, who has positioned himself as a privacy advocate and previously criticized the merger last month, complained in a letter to Google CEO Eric Schmidt that the company had initially agreed to let his aides visit the so-called Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif. but then didn't confirm a date. Barton is the senior Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has Internet regulation as one of its responsibilities.

The two men met in person on November 7 and the idea of a visit came up. But then, Barton said in his letter on Wednesday, "all efforts to reach a mutually agreeable time have been rebuffed, and it begins to seem that no date for a visit is sufficiently convenient to Google. Your warm initial invitation followed by Google's chilly response to a proposed visit by Committee counsels is disconcerting."

CEO Ed Colligan does not appear to be among those who will be laid off, at least yet. It's hard to see how fewer people will make it easier for Palm to create something new, but the company doesn't really have a choice if it wants to stay in business. It's really sad to see a company that has played such a pivotal role in the advancement of mobile computing on the brink like this.

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Glad to see this; I'm still bummed about the closing of the Boston Computer Museum

Mountain View, Calif., soon will offer technology enthusiasts something they can't see anywhere else: an original copy of Apple's first business plan.

There's also a prototype for an Apple computer code-named Cadillac that never made it to market, a 1982 Commodore 64, and wooden wagon wheels that once graced a bar popular among Silicon Valley engineers.

In 1978, I.B.M. was beginning to design its PC, which was a radical break for a company that had until then resisted open architectures and industry standards. Mr. Lowe invited Mr. Nelson to the company’s offices in Atlanta for a 90-minute presentation.

The resulting slide show, in which Mr. Nelson sketched out a world in which computer users would be able to retrieve information wherever they were, came as a shock to the blue-suited I.B.M. executives, Mr. Lowe said. It gave a hint of the world that the PC would bring, and even though the I.B.M.-ers were getting ready to transform a hobbyist business into one of the world’s major industries, they had no clue of the broader social implications. That would have to wait two decades for the rise of Google and the search engines.

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Conversations are meant to be personal and human. Being able to quickly chat is great, and the built in Gtalk for Gmail is a good example of a quick and dirty IM client. But the new Yahoo! Messenger re-humanizes IM conversations. It provides a rich experience around instant messaging that makes it feel more personal and more engaging. You’re supposed to have that emotional attachment when you talk to someone and it’s the little transitions, flow, and animations that help restore that humanity. I know it sounds cheesy, but this application brings a lot of the human element back to chatting for me because of it’s user experience. That’s part of what RIAs are all about: more natural experiences through user interface.

See the full post for screen shots of a Flash/Flex-based service-centric Office 2007 clone (created by Sabeer Bhatia, who previously created Hotmail).

Here are the first screenshots of Live Documents, a Microsoft Office like productivity suite that seeks to challenge Google Docs and Zoho Office.

As you may have noticed, the individual programs of Live Documents look like a replica of their Microsoft Office 2007 counterparts including the color scheme, ribbon GUI, icons and the layout. The difference being that Live Documents runs completely in your browser.

PressPass: What is Office Live Workspace and how does it try to help Office users?

Gregersen: Office Live Workspace is the first Office Live service for all Office users. It provides an easy way for people to save their Office documents and other files to the web, and then to share their work and collaborate with others. We think that Office Live Workspace will be important for our 500 million Office customers because it’s one of the first tightly integrated web-based sharing and collaboration services designed to give a seamless experience for Office users.

The service also responds to some of the top requests that we’ve gotten from Office customers, which require a combination of the web and great integration with Office on the desktop to really solve. The way that Office Live Workspace extends Office on the desktop is a good example of what Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie refer to as our “software plus services” approach.

Microsoft Office Live Workspace beta enables you to use Microsoft Office applications, such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, with your online workspaces. To make this integration easier, the Microsoft Office Live Add-in for Microsoft Office installs a new toolbar in Microsoft Office XP and Microsoft Office 2003 and new menu options in Microsoft Office 2007. With these tools, you can open Microsoft Office documents prepared on your computer and save them to Office Live Workspace. This integration of Microsoft Office documents with your workspaces can help you work more effectively with your friends, family, and business associates using any computer with an Internet connection.

Electronic payments are continuing to displace paper checks, outnumbering them two-to-one as of last year, with automatic deposits and withdrawals and debit card transactions showing the fastest growth, a Federal Reserve study showed yesterday.

The study of noncash payments showed the number of paper checks fell 7 billion between 2003 and the end of 2006, to 30.6 billion, while electronic payments grew about 19 billion over the same period, to 62.7 billion.

Google Inc.'s controversial Street View feature, which offers 360-degree, street-level images of urban life so clear that passersby often can be identified, is set to make its Boston debut this morning.

Starting at around 10 a.m., Internet users who click on the "Street View" box on Google Maps (maps.google.com), will be able to peek at images from streets in Boston and surrounding communities. The views were stiched together from images taken by Google employees over the past year from cars and vans equipped with cameras.

Sunday, December 09, 2007

Now we can add astroturfing to bad haircuts, excessive sweating, and other apparently less press-worthy reasons (e.g., lack of substantive ideas, insufficient respect for the United State constitution, dubious moral integrity, and limited leadership potential...) for losing elections

Now, as we come to the end of a tumultuous political year, it seems clear that the candidates and their advisers absorbed the wrong lessons from Dean’s moment, or at least they failed to grasp an essential truth of it, which is that these things can’t really be orchestrated. Dean’s campaign didn’t explode online because he somehow figured out a way to channel online politics; he managed this feat because his campaign, almost by accident, became channeled by people he had never met. Dean for America was branded from its core antiwar message down to the design of some of its bumper stickers and buttons by laptop-laden volunteers, and these strangers, it could be argued, both made and unmade the candidate. In the new and evolving online world, the greatest momentum goes not to the candidate with the most detailed plan for conquering the Web but to the candidate who surrenders his own image to the clicking masses, the same way a rock guitarist might fall backward off the stage into the hands of an adoring crowd.

An important reality check, on the 20th anniversary of NSFnet; see the full article for details

IN the 2000 election, Al Gore, then the vice president, was derided by opponents who claimed that he had said he “created” the Internet. But many of the scientists, engineers and technology executives who gathered here to celebrate the Web’s birth say he played a crucial role in its development, and they expressed bitterness that his vision had been so discredited.

Mr. Gore had been instrumental in introducing legislation, beginning in 1988, to finance what he originally called a “national data highway.”

At least two companies now sell software to universities and other institutions that captures the words of classroom lectures and syncs them with the digital images used during the talk — usually PowerPoint slides and animations. The illustrated lectures are stored on a server so that students can retrieve them and replay the content on the bus ride home, clicking along to the exact section they need to review.

Saturday, December 08, 2007

Parrot "Billy" is the newest contender for Official Gizmodo Mascot 2007, were such contests to exist (which though they may, we'd never award a bird the honor since birdfights aren't all that lucrative). Whenever his keeper leaves the room, the parrot mimics his cellphone ringer, sending the man into a mad dash for his phone...only to be laughed at by a bird.

But the best part? The owner has changed his ringer five times, but the bird keeps learning the new tunes

Friday, December 07, 2007

Baxter Wood is one of Hubert Dreyfus' most devoted students. During lectures on existentialism, Wood hangs on every word, savoring the moments when the 78-year-old philosophy professor pauses to consider a student's comment or relay how a meaning-of-life question had him up at 2 a.m. But Wood is not sitting in a lecture hall on the UC Berkeley campus, nor has he met Dreyfus. He is in the cab of his 18-wheel big rig, hauling dog food from Ohio to the West Coast or flat-screen TVs from Los Angeles to points east.The 61-year-old trucker from El Paso eavesdrops on the lectures by downloading them for free from Apple Inc.'s iTunes store, transferring them to his Hewlett-Packard digital media player, then piping them through his cabin's speakers. He hits pause as he approaches cities so he can focus more on traffic than on what Nietzsche meant when he said God was dead, then shifts his attention back to the classroom.

On Monday, SAP broke with precedent by saying it would introduce a version of its upcoming customer relationship management software for the iPhone before launching versions for mobile devices from RIM and Palm Inc (PALM.O: Quote, Profile , Research).

The reason? SAP's own salespeople were clamoring for it, saying the iPhone was easier to use, according to Bob Stutz, SAP senior vice president in charge of developing customer relationship management software.

JetBlue, Yahoo Inc and Research in Motion plan to offer free, in-flight, Wi-Fi web connections for laptop computers and advanced cell phones, Rim said on Thursday.

The service will allow passengers to access customized Yahoo mail and Yahoo instant messenger services on their laptops or to access corporate e-mails on Wi-Fi enabled versions of the popular Blackberry device from Rim.

"A date which will live in infamy" recalled; see the article for more details

The attack unfolded almost exactly as Genda had drawn it up and might have succeeded strategically, too, if the American aircraft carriers had been in port on Dec. 7. As it was, the three carriers were at sea that day and escaped unscathed, a fact that would come back to haunt the Japanese seven months later at Midway.

The raid must be considered only a partial tactical success as well. Surprise was achieved, and the American fleet took a beating, particularly the battleships. The major airfields were put out of action, and most of the planes were destroyed on the ground. But the Japanese failed to get the carriers -- which would prove to be the decisive weapon of the Pacific war -- and also committed a major blunder by failing to destroy the oil reserves on Oahu, reserves that would have taken months to replenish from mainland refineries.

At a time when airlines have cut back on meals and just about everything else, US carriers are about to launch a new era that at long last will allow passengers to send e-mails and instant messages and connect to the Web.

The in-flight digital revolution begins Tuesday on a plane that JetBlue Airways has equipped with free WiFi access, allowing passengers to send e-mails and instant messages via their laptops or BlackBerrys.

Thursday, December 06, 2007

As part of Microsoft Corp.’s Unlimited Potential effort to bring the benefits of technology to the next 5 billion people by transforming education, fostering local innovation, and enabling jobs and opportunity, Microsoft today announced plans to further expand flash-based Windows XP support for low-cost hardware computing devices. This builds on the success of similar support for devices such as Intel Corporation’s Classmate PC and ASUS’ Eee PC, complementing Unlimited Potential’s focus on transforming education in emerging segments.

Wall Street is hoping to present the market for initial public offerings with an early holiday treat: the highly anticipated share sale of software company NetSuite Inc.

Yesterday, the company, majority-owned by Oracle Corp. Chief Executive Larry Ellison and his family, set the terms of its offering, which could raise as much as $99.2 million, and prepared to begin meetings with prospective investors today. The trading debut is set for the week before Christmas.

[...]

Mr. Ellison is the company's largest shareholder. He and his family own a combined 74% of the company, a level that will decline to 66% post-IPO.

Microsoft in a statement said it is trying to rework Windows XP to run on Mr. Negroponte's computer, called the XO laptop. The company for the first time outlined challenges it says it faces in making the software work on the machine. Included in those challenges is that XO for uses a small amount of semiconductor-based memory for storage instead of a hard drive. Windows is designed for computers with hard drives.

James Utzschneider, general manager of Microsoft's Unlimited Potential Group said the company will test the Windows-based XO laptops starting January 2008 in the U.S., India and possibly Romania. Depending on the outcome of the trials, Windows XP for the computers could be available as early as the second half of 2008, he said.

Wednesday, December 05, 2007

More Open XML/ODF news; see the full article for more details, e.g., commentary from Miguel de Icaza

On December 4, Microsoft began rolling out three new translators that it plans to make available this month: A 1.1 update of its translator for Word; an Open XML spreadsheet translator and a presentation translator.

It appears that Microsoft has now provided 662 responses to the ISO comments on DIS29500 (Office Open XML) through Ecma, but those responses are presently only available to members of the ISO voting organizations through password-protected access. This move is already gathering much criticism from the ODF camp.

Guess what: those responses are neither provided in ODF format nor in OOXML. They are 662 individual PDF files. How ironic is that...?

My $.02: a 2008/02 ISO vote to standardize Open XML would help to make Open XML more acceptable to organizations that mandate global standards, but it's not a make-or-break scenario for Open XML. First, Open XML already is a standard -- an Ecma International standard (albeit a standards body that is not considered by some people to be international in scope). Second, Open XML is also already a de facto standard, with a large and growing ecosystem, due to its use as the default Office 2007 file format, and support from vendors such as Altova, Apple, NextPage, Novell, and many others.

Interesting times -- I suspect the final chapter for AOL will come in 2008 (e.g., spun-off from Time Warner and acquisition fodder in the broader Google/Microsoft/Yahoo competitive landscape)

Google’s $1 billion investment in AOL may not have been the most financially savvy move as an investment. (Most analysts think AOL is worth far less than the $20 billion value that Google put on it.) But Google did get some payoff today.

Now Gmail users can have instant-message conversations with users of AOL’s AIM system. (Here is Google’s blog post on this.) Google’s standalone message system, Google Talk, has not been a big hit. Then it started integrating its instant message system in a column on the left margin of Gmail, and it is picking up some more users.

Still, in the United States, AIM continues to be the dominant instant-message system by far. A typical teenager is chatting away on AIM, even as he or she trolls MySpace or Facebook for dates.

Cisco Systems Inc. appointed former Motorola Inc. executive Padmasree Warrior chief technology officer to help usher in its vision for more connected products.

Ms. Warrior is a champion of the concept of "seamless mobility," or the ability for multiple connected devices to share the same video, voice and data for improved communication. Those goals were shunted aside when Motorola turned to fixing its troubled cellphone business. Her talents may find a more receptive home at Cisco, the San Jose, Calif., networking titan that has been attempting to expand beyond its core business.

We’ve always felt that the iPhone’s game-changing feature was its Web browser. Now we have proof: iPhone owners were responsible for nearly one out of every 1,000 Web page views last month. This erases any doubt that the future of mobile devices most certainly includes the Web.

[...]

IPhone owners embraced the browser to the extent that they represented 0.09% of all Web pages viewed in November. That doesn’t sound like much, but consider that through September, Apple had only sold 1.4 million iPhones. As a point of comparison, devices running every version of Windows mobile operating system combined made up 0.06% of Web page views

For months, I've been trying to get Google (NSDQ: GOOG) to discuss its data center strategy. My approach was flawed. I could have gotten more information at a Rotary Club luncheon this week in Hickory, N.C.

Until recently, Google didn't talk to anyone about the data centers it's building around the world at a cost of about $600 million each, but company officials realized they needed to open up as the locals started asking questions about the tall fences, bulldozers, and dust being kicked up in their communities. So Google now talks strategy with the people directly affected.

See the full article for more on the Flex integration and SharePoint bashing. The official Alfresco "open source social computing" press release can be found here.

Quickly following up on its recent integration with Facebook, Alfresco is expected to release the 2.9 version of its open-source content management platform on Tuesday. Features in the release include integrations with popular Web-based services like iGoogle and MediaWiki, as well as Adobe's Web development tools.

"What we've pulled together is the de facto, standard tools people are already using," said Ian Howells, Alfresco's chief marketing officer. "What we're doing is sort of giving you all the classic enterprise control, but in a social-networking platform."

Yahoo Japan Corp. and eBay Inc. agreed yesterday to team up in online auctions, planning services for next year that will make it easier for consumers to buy things over the Internet from the United States and Japan.

The move marks a return to Japan by eBay, which pulled out in 2002, never able to compete against the domination of Yahoo there.

Yahoo said by March, those in Japan will be able to bid for items on eBay through the Yahoo auction site in Japan. By the middle of next year, similarly, a site will be set up that will allow Americans to buy Yahoo Japan auction items through the eBay site.

Tuesday, December 04, 2007

See the full post for some hints about what Google is doing with JotSpot (after the acquisition on Halloween, 2006)

The main presenter was Scott Johnston, the former VP of Product Development at JotSpot and new Googler (Noogler). As any fan of Google (Foogler?) already knows, JotSpot was recently acquired by Google and is currently being integrated into the Google Apps family of products. He walked the group through the rationale for the acquisition, which fits in nicely with Google’s mission to “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. It makes perfect sense, given Google’s focus on the user, their status as the world’s largest supercomputer, and their rapid innovation and product development cycles. All of these combine to bridge the “Information Black Hole” as he described it, which causes information retrieval to be an expensive, complex and unreliable problem.

Keep the context in mind -- Fake Steve Jobs -- but skim the lists of Google offerings and acquisitions in this post and ponder the implications

So in the spirit of open source collaboration (which Google loves because it means you give them your ideas for free) I am using my blog to host a competition to help Google find something else to do besides search-based text ads.

HELP GOOGLE FIND A NEW BUSINESS

A few guidelines. In order to fit with Google's established business model your business idea must be something where (a) other people do most of the work; (b) Google gets the money; and (c) it can remain in beta forever.

I don't know the background on Net Applications, the firm behind this market analysis, but it's an interesting snapshot

Windows Vista made its biggest leap yet in November -- the operating system was in use on nearly one out of 10 Internet-connected computers last month, according to a research firm.

Vista's exact share rose about one percentage point to 9.19% in November, up from 7.94% in October, according to Net Applications. In contrast, Vista's predecessor, Windows XP, fell by about one percentage point from 79.41% of all Internet-connected computers in October to 78.37% in November, according to Net Applications. Meanwhile, the Mac platform's share continued to grow, reaching nearly 7%.

Windows' overall share continues to exceed 92%, according to the Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based research firm.

Linux was in use on 0.6% of PCs worldwide, according to Net Applications. Despite its small share, Linux's slice of the market has nearly doubled since the beginning of the year

Monday, December 03, 2007

A particularly fruitful area of computer modeling has been the study of global climate change. Ten years ago, experts agreed that humans probably were contributing to global warming. Now, in part because of a 10,000-fold increase computing power and better accuracy in climate simulations, scientists are sure of it.

One result is that computer climate models can now simulate atmospheric and oceanic conditions and, crucially, how changes in each affect the other, experts said. Now the worry is not that computing power is inadequate but that the aging of NASA's weather satellites will lead to a shortage of input data before long, Seager and others said.

Mr Goodnight points out that it is not just the benefits that keep people at SAS—“it's the challenge of the work”. SAS is a leader in the field of “business intelligence”, which helps companies use data to understand their own businesses. It has continually increased its annual revenue, to around $1.9 billion in 2006, has always been profitable and has never borrowed a penny. Its success has made Mr Goodnight, now 64, the richest man in North Carolina, with a net worth of around $9 billion. SAS's products are used to perform analysis in data-intensive industries such as insurance, health care, banking and retailing. As other software has become increasingly commoditised, business intelligence has become a hot field. It has attracted the attention of giants such as SAP and IBM, both of which have recently acquired business-intelligence firms. (SAP bought Business Objects for $7 billion, and IBM paid $5 billion for Cognos.)

Tangent: it looks like all economist.com content is subscription-free these days

One thing you can say for Microsoft (MSFT): It doesn't give up without a fight. Its first music player, called the Zune, failed to even ding Apple's (AAPL) market-beating iPod, so Microsoft has come right back with version 2.0. And while I think iPod and iTunes will hang on to their leadership for now, an all-you-can-eat music subscription plan gives the Zune some real advantages.

Sunday, December 02, 2007

It should come as no surprise, of course, given it was essentially a legal temper tantrum on the part of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

But a judge in Massachusetts wisely denied an inane request by the Palo Alto, Ca.-based social networking startup to take down confidential court documents that 01238 magazine had made available for downloading on its Web site.

THIS is hardly new — we’ve already come a long way from the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 for a Senate seat, which held the audience rapt, on one occasion, for three hours — then everyone dispersed for dinner and came back for the four-hour rebuttal. The contrast with the public’s attenuated attention in the age of television, which Neil Postman pointed out in his 1985 book “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business,” was great. The contrast is all the greater today, with the advent of the short, nonlinear clips of YouTube.

It is easy to forget that this is YouTube’s first presidential campaign: the company was founded in only 2005 and acquired by Google in 2006. By the time the next campaign cycle rolls around in 2011, YouTube’s influence on the culture may be so complete that a 45-minute linear video of a question-answer session will seem to most people to be about 43 minutes too long.